Note: Upon my return to UNC in Jan 2026, I expect to be focused primarily on research at the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development. If you are particularly bored or looking for an insomnia cure, please feel free to read this extended description of my research below.
Research Interests
Collaborating with students is the best part of academia, and I have benefitted greatly from the opportunity to work an amazing group of trainees. Below I discuss the focus of our work in the past few years with tremendous gratitude for, and pride in their achievements.
Throughout my career, nearly all of our research has focused on bi-directional associations between adolescents’ interpersonal experiences and numerous aspects of development. For many years, this has included an emphasis on a) interpersonal models of adolescent depression and self-injury; and b) peer influence and adolescent health risk behaviors. However, in recent years (and in collaboration with Drs. Eva Telzer and Kristen Lindquist), this work has expanded to incorporate neural markers of social/affective development as outcomes, the role of interpersonal factors on the development of neural networks, and especially c) the role of adolescents’ technology-mediated interpersonal experiences, including teens’ social interactions online, which has become a focus for the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development. Our research draws upon a developmental psychopathology framework to examine interpersonal factors as contributors to, or consequences of psychological difficulties, incorporate longitudinal methods, as well as multi-informant and multi-method approaches.
Interpersonal Models of Adolescent Depression and Self-Injury
For many years, research in the lab has offered evidence for a new model to understand adolescent suicide. Rather than examine static, non-specific, and distal risk factors that seek to identify those at long-term risk of nonsuicidal self-injury, suicidal ideation, or suicidal behavior (i.e., decades later), or predict psychopathology more generally, our work has sought to demonstrate that 1) time-varying risks, 2) developmentally sensitive intervals, 3) stress responses in vivo, and 4) risk factors unique to suicide specifically may help to identify those at imminent risk in adolescence with far greater accuracy. This work has included some notable advances in the past five years.
For instance, our work examining time-varying models of suicide risk factors has taken advantage of rare multi-wave and multi-method data collected in our lab to reveal that rather than absolute levels of stress or subjective distress (i.e., compared to all adolescents), suicidal behavior among adolescents’ could be far better predicted by understanding how social or biological risk factors (e.g., maltreatment histories or HPA axis responses to stress) interact with person-centered elevations in interpersonal stress (i.e., relative to adolescents’ own typical level of stress) (Eisenlohr-Moul et al., 2019; Miller et al. 2019).
Our work on developmentally sensitive periods offered both conceptual and empirical contributions demonstrating that pubertal-induced changes in social and cognitive development may render some adolescents especially vulnerable to poor problem-solving or maladaptive biological responses in the context of interpersonal stress; these delayed developmental competencies are prospectively associated with adolescents’ self-injury and suicidal behavior (Clayton et al., 2022; Miller & Prinstein 2019, Pollak, Cheek et al., in press). In particular, this work also has demonstrated that following menarche, suicidal behavior among those identified at birth as female is most likely during certain phases of the menstrual cycle, is likely related to varying biological responses to stress during the luteal phase among a subset of young women, and may be prevented using hormone replacement therapy (Eisenlohr-Moul et al., 2022; Owens et al. 2023).
Our work on biological responses to interpersonal stress has demonstrated repeatedly that we can understand which adolescents are most likely to attempt suicide by examining how markers of the central and peripheral nervous system respond to interpersonal stress. Our research has revealed these effects for cortisol and cardiovascular indices of parasympathetic stress responses, for salivary markers of inflammatory gene expression, and now for blood-based markers of an epigenetic conserved transcription response to adversity (i.e., downregulation of viral immunity, upregulation of inflammation response) in response to lab-induced interpersonal stress (Clayton et al., 2023). Recently, our research also demonstrated that self-injurious behavior also is predicted prospectively by neural responses to social adversity, in combination with actual rejection in adolescents’ social context (Pollak, Kwon et al., in press).
Last, our emerging work has begun to identify the social and cognitive risk factors that make emotionally vulnerable adolescents most likely to engage self-injury and suicide as compared to a range of other potential maladaptive and diagnoseable behaviors. This focus on suicide propinquity has offered an opportunity to develop theoretical models and clinical applications to prevent suicide specifically (Miller & Prinstein, 2019; Clayton, Pollak, & Prinstein, 2023).
Peer Influence and Adolescent Health Risk Behaviors
A second program of research pertains to the study of peer influence. Our research has long examined how peer experiences, such as youths’ acceptance and rejection from peers, peer victimization, friendship, popularity, are associated with both positive and deleterious developmental outcomes, and these findings have offered ongoing contributions to the field of developmental psychology. In the past 10-15 years, our work has focused specifically on peer influence processes, with a particular focus on questions that had rarely been examined in the literature, including an understanding of why adolescents may conform to their peers, which adolescents may be most susceptible to peer socialization, and whether variation in neural indices of social and emotional functioning may be associated with individual variability in peer influence effects. A call for a shift to these types of new questions in the field has been captured in several invited pieces published in the past several years that offer future directions for the field (e.g., Prinstein & Giletta, 2020; 2021).
This work has been fruitful. Our long-term project examining hundreds of prior studies resulted in a large meta-analysis of peer socialization studies conducted over five continents, revealing consistent peer socialization effects across a wide range of behaviors in adolescence, significant variability across adolescents, and exciting potential for more research examining shorter time lags and new methodological approaches for understanding the potential effects of influencers on influences (Giletta et al., 2021).
Using a novel experimental paradigm based on social psychological theories and methods, our lab has been engaged in work for many years to watch the process of peer influence unfold before our very eyes in the lab, and with high experimental control. Our paradigm (and newest paradigm; see Duell et al., 2022) allows us to combine methodological traditions across sub-disciplines of psychology, randomize participants across conditions, and demonstrate causality between predictors of peer socialization and adolescents’ susceptibility – a rare task within this literature. For the past 10-15 years, our findings have demonstrated that among boys, but not girls, influencers’ popularity and likeability predict heightened susceptibility towards health risk behaviors, weight-related behaviors, and even prosocial behavior among adolescents. In recent years, our work has been able to better understand why.
Our findings come from both recent studies using our experimental paradigm and our work understanding neural activity in response to social stimuli. Conjointly, findings have revealed that adolescents’ emerging identities are closely tied to their understanding of social cues, the social rewards they receive from emulating high status peers’ behavior, and that conformity is likely reinforced by changes in adolescents’ self-esteem (Do et al., 2022; Field et al., 2024; Telzer et al. 2021).
Adolescents Online and Technology-Mediated Social Interactions
There is no doubt that adolescents’ social context has changed dramatically in the past two decades. The ubiquity of technological devices, the popularity of online social networking and content-sharing platforms, and the remarkable number of hours that virtually all adolescents report engaging with one another online has been well documented. But the relevance of this social context to adolescents’ development has been less clear. Nevertheless, strong opinions prevail, some backed by data of varying quality and others backed by political, economic, legal, or fear-based motives. With Dr. Eva Tezler, recent research has offered an opportunity to utilize rigorous and unbiased scientific approaches to examine the ways in which aspects of adolescents’ biological, social, and psychological development may be potentially aided or harmed by adolescents’ engagement in this new social context.
Our research has “unpacked” this seemingly simplistic question into many smaller questions that help to understand the multiple developmental contexts and competencies that are relevant for understanding the role of online experiences. In doing so, this work has offered a new approach for research in this field by suggesting more nuanced and complex understanding of the specific features and functions afforded by social media that may affect youth differently based on their prior social or psychological characteristics (Maheux et al., in press; Nesi et al., 2020; Prinstein et al., 2020).
For instance, this work has examined why 1) why technology or social media might offer different benefits or risks than other technological advances that have changed human communication over the history of our species (e.g., the printing press, telephone, etc.) (Nesi et al, 2018a; 2018b); 2) the potential benefits of social media use (Massing-Schaffer et al., 2022); 3) what types of social media use may increase or decrease mental health risk (e.g., Garrett et al., 2023; Nesi & Prinstein, 2019); 4) who may be most susceptible to potentially negative effects of tech/social media on mental health (Armstrong-Carter et al., 2023; Nesi et al., 2023); 5) how tech/social media content promotes adaptive or maladaptive behavior; 6) whether teens are more influenced by peers online; 7) whether digital media may cause youth stress (Nick et al., 2022); 8) what are teens not doing when using tech/social media; 9) the effects of “problematic” social media use (Burnell et al., under review), 10) how is social media use related to brain development (Maza et al., 2023); 11) what school policies are associated with maximal benefits for youth; 12) how do youth interact with AI chatbots and how may this promote developmental benefits or risks?
For more information, please see a list of publications, my CV, or review the website of the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development for my latest work.